


when the evening comes, we smile

by loveleee



Category: Mad Men
Genre: F/M, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-01 11:19:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 5,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4017802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveleee/pseuds/loveleee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They leave the office at 3 pm, and not a minute sooner.</p><p>(Peggy & Stan, month by month, person to person.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. october

**october**

They leave the office at 3 pm, and not a minute sooner.

( _“Lorraine will_ know _,” Peggy had insisted, squirming as Stan’s beard tickled her neck. “She already hates us.”_

 _“She hates_ you _,” he’d mumbled back._ )

They give the cabbie her address, even though it’s further away. Peggy wonders if there are still remnants of Elaine in Stan’s apartment that he doesn’t want her to see: hair ties on the bathroom floor, socks at the bottom of the hamper, a bottle of wine in the kitchen that she bought and never opened. Peggy still finds the odd reminder of Abe now and then, even two years later.

The weather is warm for late October, and she rolls down the window, turning her flushed face towards the air.

Something had shifted the moment they’d slid into the backseat of the taxi; not in a bad way, but in a different way. Like the further they get from the office, the more real it becomes. Stan looks so relaxed, his hand resting casually on her thigh like it’s the millionth time instead of the first, and she can’t understand how. She still feels dizzy. Her heart’s still pounding.

This isn’t how it was with Abe, or Ted, or Mark, or Duck. It’s nothing like before. It barely makes sense, it makes _perfect_ sense; she remembers kissing him in the dark, his hand on her cheek, and maybe she’s been wearing blinders ever since.

“Say it again,” Peggy says, and she looks at him, at Stan, and he smiles and his eyes crinkle up and how did she not recognize it? It’s so obvious. It’s _so_ obvious.

“Say what?”

She swats at his arm, and he catches her hand and holds it, just holds it, warm in his own.

She can’t wait to get home.


	2. november

**november**

“Pumpkin is fine, Ma.” Pause. “He’s a grown man, Ma, he’ll eat whatever you put in front of him.”

Stan flashes her a thumbs up from where he’s sprawled out on the sofa, sketchpad in his lap. He doesn’t really like pumpkin pie, but Peggy’s right. He’ll eat whatever he’s served, especially at the Thanksgiving dinner where he’s going to meet his girlfriend’s family for the first time.

“Look, I – no, I don’t have one of those. I have work to do, Ma. Yes. Yes. Of course. Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye.”

Peggy drops the phone on the hook and sighs loudly. “Can we just…not go tomorrow?”

Stan frowns, shading in the curve of a bottle with his pencil. “What?”

“I can tell them you’re sick. I can still make dinner. You don’t really care if it’s turkey, right?”

He cranes his neck around to look at her. “No way. We’re going. They’ll think _I_ didn’t want to come.”

“Well _do_ you?”

Truth be told, he’s been curious to meet Ma and Anita and Gerry for years. Peggy had always told her stories about them with a sense of grave wrongdoing – how _dare_ her mother comment on her new haircut, how _dare_ her sister point out she’s wearing mismatched socks – but Stan had always thought that they sounded hilarious.

“Of course I do. I want to meet the people responsible for Peggy Olson.”

Peggy rolls her eyes. “Whatever I am, it’s despite them, not because of them.” She flicks her pen around on her desk a few more times in annoyance. “Fine, we’ll go.”

Then she stands up to stretch, and he watches the fabric of her dress pull tight against her breasts, the little expanse of thigh that’s exposed as it rides up. It drove him crazy, knowing what she looked like under those clothes for _years_ and never being able to actually see her. Now he sees her without them all the time and it’s still driving him crazy.

He considers their surroundings: Peggy’s office door is already closed. Neither of them has any meetings for the rest of the day. And they’re both good at staying quiet when they need to be.

But although the office tends to clear out early the day before a long weekend, it’s only just about noon. Maybe later. Maybe tonight, when the hallways are dark and silent, and they’re the only ones left.

Peggy’s looking at him with narrowed eyes, like she knows exactly what he’s thinking – maybe she does, she _probably_ does, it’s one of the things that’s so great about her – and she puts her hands on her hips. “You want lunch?”

“Yes I do,” he says, and smiles when she reaches out a hand to help him up.


	3. december

**december**

“I think Ted knows,” Stan waves a french fry between them, “about us.”

Peggy frowns, sipping at her coffee. It’s a Wednesday evening, and her toes are still cold from the extra six blocks they’d walked to find a diner where no one from the office would run into them. She slips her feet out of her shoes, rubbing them against Stan’s ankles for warmth. “How?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “He just gave me this…look, when we were leaving the Butler meeting today.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. Ted’s always giving looks.” She shakes her head. “I think we’ve been very professional.”

“Yes, you were _very_ professional when you locked Portner out of our office for nearly an hour yesterday,” he says, his mouth twisting into a smug smile.

“Ugh, Portner.” Peggy makes a face. “He makes me miss Ed. I think he even makes me miss Mathis _._ ”

“He makes me miss _Danny_.”

She giggles. “No he doesn’t.”

“Yeah, he doesn’t,” Stan admits, snorting.

Peggy takes a bite of her hamburger, wincing at the chewy texture. They really need to find a better place to eat if they’re going to keep sneaking around like this. “Fuck Ted,” she finally says. “I hope he does know.”

Something darkens in Stan’s face, just slightly, and he studies her, tapping one finger slowly on the tabletop. “Really?”

Peggy nods, still chewing. “Really.”

“Huh.” His finger taps a little faster, _tick tick tick_ on the formica. “I thought you were over that.”

She takes another sip of coffee. “I _am_ over that.”

“‘Fuck Ted’ is not the words of someone who’s over it.”

Peggy’s eyes narrow. “What are you trying to say?”

“You do realize that if someone like Ted knows, we have to deal with personnel,” he says, ignoring the question. “They might not let us keep working together.”

“They know we’re a package deal,” Peggy says. “Half of them probably think we’re sleeping together, anyway.”

“We’re doing a little more than just sleeping together.”

He’s right. Barely seven weeks in, and she already knows it wasn’t a fluke, wasn’t a mistake. Wasn’t just something she talked herself into in the heat of the moment. Peggy swallows, a flutter in her chest that she can’t get used to, no matter how many times she feels it.

“So who cares?” she says. “We’re together. If they put us on different accounts…” Peggy shrugs, her palms upturned in the air for exaggeration.

Stan sighs, scratching at his beard. “Yeah, okay,” he says, picking sullenly at his fries. “I’ll just miss you, alright?”

Peggy smiles and runs her foot further up his calf. “You’ll still see me all the time. You can still call me. This is all hypothetical.” She tilts her head. “Maybe it’d be good. You’re going to get sick of me.”

“I doubt that.” He looks up from his plate. “So. Did we just decide we’re going public?”

Her whole body feels warm for the first time since they stepped outside the office. “Yeah,” she says, “I guess we did.”


	4. january

**january**

“L.A.”

“Too much driving,” Peggy wrinkles her nose. “Acapulco?”

Stan shakes his head. “Neither of us speaks Spanish.”

“You don’t have to speak it.”

“I’d feel like an ass _not_ speaking it.”

“Fine.” She rolls her eyes. “Hawaii.”

“There’s a thought.”

Her eyebrows lift in surprise. “Really.”

He shifts closer across the mattress, one finger tracing a line from the hollow of her throat down between her breasts. “Yeah. You’d look sexy in one of those coconut bikini things.”

Peggy laughs, rolling onto her back, and lifts a hand to rest on his ribcage as he moves over her. She loves this. Everything about it: the dopey look on his face when he looks at her body; the smell of his pillow; the fact that they can have conversations naked in his bed now, and not only across a fluorescent-lit office, backed by a window the size of a postage stamp.

“I’ve never seen the Pacific,” she reminds him.

“It looks like the Atlantic. A lot of water.” Stan’s getting distracted now, nuzzling at her neck. “Are we done fantasizing? I wanna go down on you,” he says, his voice low and rough in her ear.

Peggy bites her bottom lip, breathing in deep as his hand moves down past her bellybutton. “ _I_ want to go to Hawaii,” she whispers back, teasing, drawing out the syllables. It had started out silly – just a list of places they’d rather be than Manhattan in January – but now she wonders if she doesn’t want to go, after all. Sun, sand, Stan. There were worse things.

“Can we do this first?”

“I suppose.” She smiles, a shiver running through her as he presses a wet kiss to her stomach. “Hawaii’s really more of a honeymoon destination, anyway,” she adds, almost an afterthought.

“Jesus Christ,” Stan mumbles against her hip. “You want to have this conversation now?”

No, but her stomach flips a little at the thought of it anyway. She plays dumb. “What conversation?”

“Stop. Talking.”

She does.


	5. february

**february**

Peggy doesn’t look up from her notebook when he enters the apartment. “Wipe your feet,” she says absently, underlining something with her pencil.

Stan obeys, brushing the melted snow from his knit hat, his beard. He slips his shoes off and crosses the room to give her a kiss on the temple. “What are you working on?”

“Mmm, just the taglines for Barilla,” she says, shifting over so he can drop onto the sofa beside her. “Nothing’s jumping out at me.”

Stan rests his chin on her shoulder, scanning the words on the page, not really taking any of them in.

“You should hear what they’re saying about Barilla. Pasta. It’s…fucking delicious.” He sighs and leans back, running his hands through his hair. It’s getting _long_ now, needs to be cut, but Elio at the barbershop always cuts it shorter than he wants and it’s still too cold out for his ears to go uncovered. “I got nothin’. I’m exhausted.”

“Aw.” Peggy bumps her knee against his affectionately, but she’s still squinting down at the page on her lap, lips slightly pursed. It’s nearly impossible to break her focus when she’s in a work mood. Usually it doesn’t bother him – he admires it, even – but it’s a Saturday evening, and it’s snowing, and he just spent more than an hour on the train to get here from the hospital, and could she look at him for five goddamned seconds?

Stan leans away, slinging an arm over the back of the sofa. Five, four, three, two, one. “Are you going to ask me how he’s doing?”

There’s a pause. “Oh,” she says, and he can detect the false note of surprise; he’s always been good at that, but he’s even better now that he spends nearly every waking moment with her. “How is Michael?”

“He’s doing well,” he says, nodding slowly. “He has a surprisingly large number of opinions about the Super Bowl, for someone who never watched football.”

Peggy raises her eyebrows, her _how about that?_ look.

Stan clears his throat, and stretches his hand out to brush his fingers against the ends of her hair. “He’d like to see you.”

He can see the exact moment her face sets in stone.

“He wants to apologize, Peggy.”

She looks back down to the notes on her lap. “You know how I feel about this.”

“I think it would mean a lot to him.” Stan sits forward, lowering his voice. “He’s doing much better. They’re even thinking about sending him home to his dad soon.”

Peggy sighs, and sets her notebook and pencil on the coffee table. “I’m glad,” she says. “And I’m glad that he has you as a friend. But…” She shakes her head. “No.”

Stan stares at her for a long moment. “I don’t understand you sometimes.”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” she tells him, “but I do expect you to respect my decision.”

“Well,” he says, “I don’t know if I can do that.” He stands up, avoiding her eyes.

“Are you _leaving_?” She sounds incredulous.

“Yeah,” he says, jamming one shoe onto his foot, then the other.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She gestures towards the window, as if he’d somehow forgotten about the snow after sitting inside for five minutes. “The trains are barely running.”

He shrugs. “Then I’ll walk.”

“Stan.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“Are you _mad_ at me?”

He pulls his hat back over his head, the wool still damp beneath his fingers. “I need to clear my head. I just spent the whole goddamned day surrounded by schizophrenics.”

He’s careful to let the door shut quietly behind him. Outside the snow is falling thicker, and it’s at that rare, beautiful stage when it’s so pure and untouched that it’s hard to believe how it’ll look tomorrow, streaked with piss and dirt and god knows what else. He could go back inside, tell Peggy he’s sorry, and watch the snowfall with her curled up at his side beneath a blanket, her cold feet tucked under his legs.

Or he could walk. See where the evening takes him. To his house; back to her doorstep; somewhere else he hasn’t thought of yet.

Stan steps off the stoop, and wonders if the snow will have filled in his footsteps by the time he returns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It may be worth clarifying - I am on Peggy's side in this; I think the nature of Ginsberg's breakdown in regards to her was such that she'd feel extremely uncomfortable around him. But I don't think Stan necessarily gets that, and I think it's a potential area of conflict for the two of them. Not a huge one, but something that would come up on occasion.


	6. march

**march**

Stan had insisted they go to the party. It was finally spring, sort of; the temperature had crept above 45 degrees for the first time in months. And they couldn’t keep spending every weekend holed up in her apartment, passing a joint back and forth, driving each other crazy.

He was right. He was definitely right. But she’d had a bad feeling about it all day, and now she knows why: Abe is there.

Stan doesn’t seem concerned when she points him out across the room. His back is to them, but she knows it’s Abe, his posture relaxed and familiar as he speaks with a bored-looking blonde in a white jumpsuit. “Go say hi,” he says, entirely unpossessive.

Peggy shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“You _lived_ with the guy.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

Stan looks at her like she’s insane.

So she doesn’t say hi, but Abe finds her in the kitchen anyway, an hour or so later as she’s pouring herself a gin and tonic. She hands him the bottle of Fleischmann’s without a word; gin was always his go-to drink.

“So you and Stan the Man, huh,” Abe says in lieu of a greeting, tipping the bottle toward her in thanks.

“Hello to you too,” Peggy says, and nods in acknowledgment of his almost-question. “We’re together.”

“I should have seen that coming.”

Peggy frowns, taking a long sip of her drink. “What are you talking about?”

“I always saw the way he looked at you. He was all…” Abe pulls a face, widening his eyes, tipping the corners of his mouth down, “googly-eyed.”

She giggles into her cup. It’s not a good imitation of Stan, but…she’s drunk. “No way.” Even as she says it she feels her neck flush a little, because Abe’s not wrong. Stan had wanted her for years. Including the ones she’d been with Abe. He’d told her that. _This is what I wanted to do to you,_ he’d whispered, his hands so hot on her bare skin.

“It’s true,” Abe says, but he’s smiling, and Peggy smiles back.

“How’s the work going?”

“Pretty good.” He crosses his arms over his chest, leaning back against the counter. “I’ve got a pretty regular gig with the _Voice_. I might be working on something for the _New Yorker_ next month.”

“I’m impressed.”

“I do alright.” Abe shrugs. “How goes the exploitation of the middle class?”

She narrows her eyes slightly, studying him for a moment. She had never been able to tell what he was thinking, not even when they were close; the line between smart-aleck and deadly serious was so thin for Abe it was nearly nonexistent. “Great. We’re both at McCann Erickson now, actually,” she adds, knowing he’ll hate it.

“Well, at least you’re excelling in your chosen field of evil.” He clinks his glass against hers. “Cheers.”

Peggy downs the rest of her drink, because why the hell not? The ice hits her teeth and she shivers. “Who are you here with?”

“My friend Charlie.” At her look, he clarifies: “A man Charlie.” Abe shrugs a little. “I’ve been seeing someone though. And I’ll tell you, she’s intrigued by that scar you left me.”

It takes a full five seconds for Peggy to understand what he means – she’s never seen the scar in question, after all – but once she does, she bursts into laughter. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Where’d you tell her it came from?”

“I didn’t tell her, it’s why she’s so intrigued.”

“Oh my god.” Peggy snorts, setting down her glass. “Well, I’d apologize but I guess I did you a favor.”

Abe shrugs, and sets his glass down too, and suddenly the moment’s turned and she’s not sure why; but it’s sadder, somehow, and she feels just barely dizzy. She rests her fingertips on the countertop, leaning a little harder on them than she should.

“Your boyfriend’s looking for you,” Abe says quietly, and nods his head to the left. She looks and Stan is there, her boyfriend, his mouth curling up into a smirk when she meets his gaze. 

“Oh,” she says. She pauses. “Abe? I’m glad you talked to me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She squeezes his hand, just for a second, and doesn’t look back when she leaves.


	7. april

**april**

It takes all of five seconds for Portner to vacate the office that he shares with Stan once Peggy walks in. “Hello to you too,” she says, letting the door swing shut behind her.

Stan grins, rolling his chair back from his desk to face her. “It’s like a Pavlovian response. He smells your hairspray and disappears.”

Peggy makes a face. “You can’t smell my hairspray,” she mutters.

Stan’s fingers brush against her hip as she walks past him and sits in the empty chair, eyeing the half-finished drawing on Portner’s desk – a woman, nude, of course – before turning back to him. She wheels the chair a little closer, kicking half-heartedly at the bottom of one of his shoes.

“What’s going on?” He leans back and runs a hand through his hair, and Peggy lets her gaze roam over his shoulders, his chest, his arms; anywhere but his face. She’s teetering on the edge of something, and she knows that looking him in the eye right now is the one thing guaranteed to push her over.

“Don’s ex-wife died,” she says. At his look of alarm, she clarifies: “The first one.” She swallows. “They had three kids.”

Stan’s shoulders sag a little, like he’s deflating. “Shit.”

Peggy nods slowly. “I know.”

“Did you know her?”

“Not really.” Peggy shrugs. “I knew her voice, over the phone. I only met her in person a few times. She was beautiful,” she adds, as though Don Draper would marry a woman who wasn’t.

“You know what happened?”

“Some kind of cancer, I think.” She shakes her head. “He never even said anything.”

Stan says nothing, just looks at her in sympathy.

“I don’t know why I’m getting upset about it,” she near-whispers, throat catching at the end.

“C’mere.” He extends his hand, and Peggy takes it, letting him pull her onto his lap. Stan smells like ink and eraser shavings and the cologne she bought him for Christmas, and she drops her forehead against his shoulder, folding her arms around his neck.

“He looked so sad,” she murmurs. He squeezes her hip, his thumb rubbing back and forth across the fabric of her dress. _And I thought about you,_ she doesn’t add; _I thought about you dying and now I can’t get it out of my head._

Peggy breathes in deep and pulls her head back slightly so she can look him in the eye. “I never told you, but. Don knows about me. He came to see me in the hospital after. Nobody knew,” and she laughs, cringing at how choked, how awful it sounds, “I didn’t even know until it was happening. But Don came to see me.”

Before he can process it, before his brain can leap ahead to the next question – that would be too painful, to see that thought cross his mind – she says, “He wasn’t...involved. But he was the only one who came to see me.”

Stan’s hands fall still, and she wonders if he can feel the way her heart’s pounding, pulsing behind her breastbone. “I didn’t know that.”

“Because I never told you.”

He brushes a lock of hair away from her face. He’s always touching her face. Always touching it gently, like he almost can’t believe it’s there, like it’ll shatter if he touches too hard. “I’m glad you did.”

Her smile is faint, trembling, but: it’s there.

“Me too.”


	8. may

**may**

The alarm rings three times before Peggy’s fingers finally fumble their way to the _off_ button. A heavy arm falls over her waist before she can sit upright.

“No.” Stan’s voice is muffled, and Peggy smiles. She can’t even see his face beneath all the pillows and hair.

“It’s six forty-five.”

“ _No._ ”

“This is when I wake up,” she insists.

“It’s your _birthday_.”

Peggy rolls her eyes. “I’m thirty-two. I’m ready to stop celebrating my birthday.”

“Well, I’m not.” He turns his head slightly, his face emerging from the bedsheets, eyes still half-shut. “We’re taking a vacation day. We sleep in.”

“I’m not _going_ anywhere. I’m just waking up,” she grumbles, but rolls onto her side to face him, hooking her foot over his ankle.

“If I let you out of bed you’ll be on the typewriter in five seconds.”

Peggy frowns. “No I won’t.”

“I know you.” His fingers find the hem of the shirt she slept in, and slip underneath, pressing warm against the skin of her back. “You’ve been having dreams about Avon all week.”

She sighs, tucking an arm beneath her pillow. He’s not wrong. But it wasn’t like there wasn’t a _reason_ for it _._ “Libby and Karen are always breathing down my neck lately. They’re just waiting for me to fail so they can…swoop in.”

“They’re less talented. And desperate. Don’t worry about them.” Stan yawns. “Go back to sleep.”

Shifting closer, Peggy closes her eyes. But her mind is buzzing. There’s next week’s deadline for Avon, and they need to figure out the Chevalier taglines by Wednesday, and Lorraine’s still being vague about whether the two of them are even still _on_ the Butler account –

“I can _hear_ you thinking.”

“I can’t sleep,” she blurts out.

Stan makes a sound that’s half sympathetic, half frustrated. “Stop. Turn your brain off.”

“I _can’t_. It doesn’t work that way. That’s why you like me.”

“That’s true.” Stan’s quiet for a moment. “You want me to distract you?” His voice immediately takes on the lazy, teasing lilt that means he’s horny, and his hand moves south from where it’s been resting on the small of her back.

Peggy bites her lip, thinking for just a second, then wriggles closer. This is the one technique that’s never failed to pull her mind away from work – not yet, anyway. “Yes.”

“Okay,” he says, sounding equally surprised and pleased when she throws her leg over him and climbs on top. She kisses him, coaxing his mouth open with her own, and his fingers squeeze into her hips, pressing her down against the bulge in his underwear.

Morning sex had never been all that fun with anyone before him – Duck got so sweaty in his sleep, and Abe had always refused to kiss her until the both of them had brushed their teeth – but as she’s discovered, that’s true of a lot of things.

“You’re so hairy,” she murmurs, kissing his neck, finding his earlobe to tug on it with her teeth. “I can’t even find your face.”

“You love it.”

“That’s what you think,” she laughs.

“Want me to shave it for your birthday?”

“ _No._ ”


	9. june

**june**

The front door bangs open, and Stan nearly drops his plate.

“Hello?” Peggy’s voice carries through the walls.

“I’m in the kitchen,” he calls back, setting his dinner onto the little kitchen table. (Spaghetti with canned tomato sauce; his mother would kill him if she were still around to see it, but who has time to watch tomatoes simmer for six hours?)

The sound of her feet slowly shuffling down the hallway is enough to tell him she’s exhausted, but she looks it too, a black smudge under one eye where she’d clearly rubbed a bit too carelessly. “Hi,” she says, and drops her forehead against his shoulder, her arms circling loosely around his waist.

“Hi.” His hand slides up her back to rub at the tense spot between her shoulders. “You should’ve called, I could’ve made enough for two.”

Peggy sighs, the heat of her breath seeping through the fabric of his shirt. She pulls away and steps past him to the refrigerator. “I made it halfway home and decided to come here instead,” she says, grabbing two beers from the inside of the fridge door.

He watches her as she finds the bottle opener in the drawer next to the sink, and pops off the caps into the trashcan. It warms something inside him to see how comfortable she is in his apartment. He likes how she just barges in, makes it her own.

Stan accepts a beer and sits; she collapses into the other chair and immediately props her feet up on his lap, resting her chin on the lip of her bottle.

“Something happen?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

He nods, knowing she will anyway. “Okay.”

Peggy swigs from her beer in a manner he can only describe as furious. “I mean, you know Ron’s been completely useless on Burger Chef.”

“I do.”

“He owed me ten pages of copy today. Guess how many he delivered.” She doesn’t let him answer. “None.”

Stan shrugs. “So fire him,” he says, pressing his thumb into the arch of her foot.

The slightest bit of tension releases from her shoulders as he rubs her feet. “Apparently _I_ can’t do that. That has to come from David.” She snorts. “David got him the job in the first place.”

“He’s on at least three other accounts,” Stan points out, sliding one hand up her leg to squeeze her calf. “Someone else’ll notice he’s terrible.”

Peggy slumps further down in her seat. “I hate him.”

He can’t help but smile. “I know.”

Peggy sits up abruptly, letting her feet fall back to the floor. “Aren’t you going to eat that?” she says, noticing his rapidly cooling spaghetti for the first time.

“How about,” he leans back and pulls open the drawer by the sink, grabbing a second fork from it, “we share.”

“I love you,” she sighs, digging in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long delay!


	10. july

**july**

“So,” Stan says, “my lease is up at the end of the month.”

Peggy tilts her head against the back of the sofa and looks at him, sprawled out half-naked at the other end. Her own bare legs are splayed before her, resting on the coffee table, a threadbare tank top stuck to her skin with sweat. _Record-breaking heat_ , the weatherman had said.

 _I can’t make it there ‘til Sunday,_ the AC repairman had said.

And then Stan had shown up Friday evening, suitcase in hand, because his entire building was being fumigated.

“Are you going to renew?”

“I don’t know.” Stan raises his eyebrows. “Am I?”

She’s so startled that for a split second, she _almost_ forgets how sweltering hot she is. “Oh.”

He’s studying her, the familiar crease in his forehead the only sign of quiet concern. His hair is pushed back from his face with one of her old headbands, and he looks ridiculous. She thinks she might laugh and cry at the same time. Or possibly vomit.

“You don’t like that idea,” he finally says.

“What idea.”

“The idea of _me_ ,” he widens his eyes for emphasis, “living with _you_.”

A bead of sweat rolls slowly down the bridge of her nose, and Peggy wipes it away in irritation. “You want to live _here_?” she says, waving her hand. “The air conditioner’s broken.”

Stan rolls his eyes, but she doesn’t miss the flash of hurt that comes first. “You don’t have to make excuses. If you’re not into it, you can just say so.”

“No, I…” Peggy pushes herself upright on the sofa, tucking her legs beneath herself as she turns to face him. “I’ve done this before. It didn’t go so well.”

“So have I. It’s not the same.”

“You don’t know that.”

Stan stares at her. “Yeah, I do.”

It’s embarrassing how easily he can still make her blush sometimes, though in this case she’s pretty sure her face is already tomato red.

“Just think about it. It doesn’t have to be here,” he says.

“I own the building.”

“You can rent it,” he shrugs. “If I’m being honest, I hate the thought of you coming back here alone every night.”

Peggy narrows her eyes. “So this is some…alpha male, protective thing,” she says.

“ _No._ ”

“I’ve lived here for years.”

“And you’re still worried about a brick coming through your window.”

She doesn’t answer.

Stan rubs a tired hand over his face. “You’re so stubborn. I don’t want you getting hurt to prove a fucking point. _And_ I want to be around you. Those things can coexist.”

Peggy softens, just barely. “I want to be around you, too.”

“Then…just think about it.” He stretches out one arm, running his finger down her arm. “I don’t care where it is.”

“You’re so cheesy,” she says, kicking half-heartedly at his foot.

“Only for you, baby.”

**Author's Note:**

> My first Mad Men fic! Ahhh! But seriously, many, many thousands more words need to be written about Peggy & Stan. Here's my small contribution. :)
> 
> The title is a line from the Carpenters song "We've Only Just Begun" which feels appropriately cheesy.


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